Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Birthday Cupcakes

So my husband's family came to visit us here in sunny California about 2 weeks ago, and we were so excited to see them and have all of the kids run around and get to spend time with each other.

On that side of the family we have 5 nieces, and during the week while they were here we had 3 of their birthdays to celebrate!

Needless to say, they all have different tastes and likes.

One niece is into princesses, one is into Star Wars, and the other likes animals.

I offered to make cupcakes, and I wanted to make them each something to make the celebration feel special and individualized.

My most popular post EVER on this blog is the Avengers birthday cake I made for my son's birthday.
(If you haven't had a chance to check that out yet, you can find it here).
To decorate the cake I printed out a coloring book page and traced it with frosting, check it out, it's awesome :)
Well, I decided to use the same decorating technique for these cupcakes.
That's right folks, I traced pictures with frosting again!
I started out by finding color book pages on the internet and re-sizing them to what I thought would be the right size for a cupcake.
I then taped the pictures under a piece of glass, and taped wax paper on top of the glass.

I tinted my frosting black and did all of the outlines first.

I then went over the outlines with the other colors.
Here we have Princess Aurora (Sleeping Beauty).

I then refrigerated the pictures to let the frosting harden.

After the frosting had hardened I cut the wax paper so it would be easier to flip the design over one at a time.

Frost your cupcake, then flip the design over and gently peel off the wax paper.

Storm Trooper!

The Death Star.

Chewbacca.
With some of the frosting designs I unfortunately didn't let them harden all the way, and they didn't turn out as well, but I was pleased with what we were able to get.
I love using this technique for decorating, it makes the possibilities endless!!

9 comments:

These looked so amazing, Michelle! The kids were so happy to celebrate their b-days with these beautifully decorated cupcakes. They were beautiful! Thanks for making them. I love how colorful they are and that you can personalize them.

I know my comment is coming years too late, but here are two things I've learned when I did this style (which I also got from the "Moey" or "broken monkey" blog).

1) Besides letting the frosting "sandwich" freeze for at least 15 min (I usually wait 20 to be sure), when I do the reverse transfer, I do it immediately, while the frosting is still frozen. It will thaw quickly, and that's why not all of the frosting transfer will make it nicely onto the cake. 2) When I make the reverse transfer, I am very careful to be sure my frosting is at least 1/4 inch thick. So even if I'm doing lettering (which is quite tricky), I will go over the backside of it with another layer right on top, just as delicately done as the first layer, so the icing looks double-high. With lettering you still have to have a sharp object to help peel away the lettering down onto the cake & you have to work FAST.

But you also have to work fast with a full transfer, too.

I wish I had a good link of what I just did, but my blogspot account is being glitchy. I didn't get my letters down fast enough, so I had to gut that spot, add more white icing base, and do it again, and even the second time my letters (from "We love you!") still had issues in the upper left hand corner, and I had to touch them up.